On parade in the food court: pizza and hot dogs and food hackers, oh my.

America, what have you done with pizza now? Of all the possible media outlets, Better Homes & Gardens is detailing your sins of Costco food-court hot dogs and pizza, and your new “hack” with which you are “obsessed.”
 
That's right in the headline at BHG.com: "Costco Shoppers Are So Obsessed with This New Food Court Hot Dog Hack."

The subhead reads, "The Costco food court is definitely a judgment-free zone." Well, Free The Pizza is not so kind a zone. Allow me to don my pizza-colored robe and bang the pepperoni gavel as I judge freely. 

Speaking as a longtime dabbler in pizza nonsense, it’s difficult for me to express just how disappointing all this is. America, you can do better.

It seems you’re going into the food court at Costco. You’re buying a hot dog and a slice of pizza. Then, you’re peeling away the cheese from the pizza slice and applying it to the hot dog in the bun.
 
This is your “hack”? With which you are “obsessed”? Such a low bar for both. What happened to American Exceptionalism?
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This lame hot-dog-and-pizza stunt doesn’t even have a snappy name like Pizza-Cheesing The Dachshund.

It also doesn’t offer any use for the slice of de-cheesed pizza. What, am I supposed to throw it out?
 
And is Better Homes & Gardens condoning this epic bulk waste? True, one slice is not so much waste. But times that one slice by a million so-called hot-dog hackers, and you’ve got landfills overflowing with denuded pizza.
 
Granted, it does get slightly better. I admit experiencing modest relief upon learning that the more holistic pizza & hot dog thinkers are working outsdie the bun. They're taking the hot dog out of the bun and relocating it to the pizza slice, folding the slice, and consuming it like some kind of Porky Pig In A Pizza Blanket. This diminishes the waste and uses the better of the two breads.
 
I also admit, as a New Englander of Scottish heritage, I appreciate a third version of this pizza and hot dog madness the most, if only for its lack of waste: Some hearty souls are taking the hot dog and the bun together, and folding the pizza slice around all of it.
 
 
Speaking as the product of generations of thrifty thinkers who invented tasty, wasteless savories like haggis (a centuries-old favorite made of sheep guts cooked inside the animal’s stomach), I applaud this.
 
Now, as a committed pizza geek, I believe this latter effort in the food court exhibits too high a ratio of bread to meat and cheese. But at least there’s some appreciation for using all the parts of the animals involved.
 
It’s well known that long ago, when the Native Americans were still hunting the fabled hot dog of the Great Plains, they used every part of the animal they killed—not just the cased meat. They used the hide, the bones, the brains, the plastic wrapper, all of it.
 
 
Still, regarding this “hack” “obsession,” there are other, multiple problems afoot. You can do better, America.
 
Right off, let’s admit that the food stunt you’re performing is hardly a “hack.” Hacking means creating an “inelegant but effective solution to a computing problem.” (Thank you, Wikipedia, for a more elegant clause than I ever could have mustered on my own.)
 
Yes, the word “hack” originates in the vernacular of the dark basements and over-lit laboratories of the computer programming subculture—a world known for its dining sophistication. Bags of slurry-made crispy chips and cellophane-wrapped chemical cakes are more the norm. In the darker basements, either (or both) of those products could be used atop a delivery pizza. Just imagine: Ho-Hos and Doritos on your Domino's!
 
 
The more nefarious context of the word “hack” relates to gaining unauthorized access to computers and computer networks. (Feel free to insert your Elon Musk hacker-punk joke right here as if it were a cold, stiff, Costco food-court hot dog.)
 
Any skill you or I possess with regard to hot dogs and pizza in the Costco food court will never rise to the level of “hacking.” If we’re lucky, it involves belching. And who doesn’t always get a laugh out of that? Even the staff at Better Homes & Gardens could get such a giggle, though I wager they’d never admit as much.
 
This little pizza and hot dog stunt doesn’t even rise to the level of “life hacking,” which is when a junk-fed computer programmer brings his penchant for unorthodox problem solving to everyday life by increasing productivity or efficiency in the four-dimensional world, the place where employment of duct tape and vice grips becomes possible.
 
Still, none of this answers the bigger question, America. Why, why did it take so long to invent this stupid food trick, and why did it have to happen at Costco?
 
 
I’ve been using pizza as a sandwich bread since long before I could make pizza on my own. As far back as the early 2000s, I was grilling Snake River Farms American Kobe beef burger patties and sandwiching them between freshly baked slices of Trader Joe’s Frozen Imported Italian Four-Cheese Pizza and serving them up for dinner.
 
Not only did they taste better than anything coming out of the food court at a big-box bulk binge-eating and doomsday-stockpiling supplier, but they did so with probably triple the lipid-soaked content of saturated fat.
 
Talk about a victory in the war on nutrition!
 
I’m also looking at you, Better Homes & Gardens. I thought you were better than this, too. You’ve been providing America with recipes since 1922 when you were still known as Fruit, Garden and Home. (Insert your own fruit gardening joke here.)
 
 
And by the way, how ironic is it that Better Homes & Gardens was founded by a former US Secretary Of Agriculture? His name was Edwin T. Meredith. Which also begs the question: Why? Did he get a pink slip from Woodrow Wilson’s Department of Horse & Buggy Efficiency and say, “I know! A women’s magazine! We’ll teach the American housewife how to move fast and break things!”

Above: portrait of Edwin T. Meredith, former US Secretary of Agriculture, and the founder of Better Homes & Gardens. Notice how his eyes follow you around the room as if you were carrying a fresh, hot pizza. Or cheesing your dachshund.

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But I digress.

​America, I just think that it’s incumbent upon you to be a better critical thinker and innovator when it comes to so-called combination “hacking” of your pizza with unrelated foodstuffs.
 
For instance, I’ve recently done a double-zero flour face-off. The results will soon appear in this space. This questionable project required making four entire marinara pizzas—and resulted in a pile of leftovers. To be exact: there were 24 pizza slices left.
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Above: leftover slices from the 00 Flour Face-Off in the Free The Pizza test kitchen.

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For over a week now, I’ve been eating leftover slices of marinara pizza for breakfast, lunch and snacks. (Dinnertime we save for such nutrition bombs as batter-dipped deep-fried butter sticks and triple-decker foie-gras grilled-cheese hamburger towers. Why aren’t you covering more such sophisticated dining “hacks,” Better Homes & Gardens?)
 
I’ve been eating leftover pizza slices, both cold and hot. I’ve also been eating those slices as sandwich bread. 

Above: Alligator sausage on a slice of marinara 00 pizza about to be topped with another slice in a gator-sausage sandwich "hack." (It's not a hack, friends. Just a sandwich.)


​I’ve even been considering doing pizza bread pudding.

Yes, I’m looking at all this pizza and thinking: I might have to add additional sauce and cheese and maybe some chopped-up pork products. But a big bowl of hot-dog pizza pudding should clog my arteries right nice. This is a mishigas worthy of a Chopped mystery basket gone horribly wrong. Pudding ho!
 
 
I haven’t yet done that, but rest assured: when it happens, you will know about it. 

Remember, our motto here at Free The Pizza is: We do these things so you don’t have to.
 
But back to you, America, and your inexplicable tardiness to the party of “hacking” pizza in the most unimaginative way possible. Such lackluster lateness speaks to a surprising inability for thinking outside the pizza box.
 
I think I know why this happens: a sweeping failure of public education. The sophisticated thinking skills that used to be developed in long-lost art, music and home economics classes have evaporated along with civics, physical education and the passenger pigeon.
 
Even Better Homes & Gardens’ participation in this reportage is questionable. How does this “Costco Food Court Hack” make a better home or garden, anyway?
 
 
Why aren't they talking about planting a pizza garden? Or that fantastic new oven that makes any kind of pizza you want as long as it’s round and thin and not some kind of un-American thick square?
 
Come on, BHG. Where’s the reporting on hacks for the flabby, comatose thinking that results from eating too many food-court pizza-dog sandwich bombs and corn-slurry crispy chip puddings with a Twinkies chaser?
 
And come on, Everybody. Be more inventive in your pizza nonsense so Better Homes & Gardens has something more interesting to report than a single, obvious situation that we all should have figured out years ago.
 
In fact, what’s your favorite bad hack for pizza? If we get enough of them, maybe we’ll commit some follow-up heresy to this baloney. I’m waiting, and so is the contact form…

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Want to make your own pizza that out-pizzas the food court at Costco? (I know, that seems like a subjective evaluation, but I'll risk such heresy.) You'll find all the simple steps to homemade pizza magic right inside my weird and award-winning pizzamaker’s manual, Free The Pizza: A Simple System For Making Great Pizza Whenever You Want With The Oven You Already Have. If you’re just beginning your pizza-making journey, this book is a convenient place to start because it doesn’t force you to make any decisions beyond making a pizza. It’s a simple, step-by-step guide for getting from zero to pizza and amazing your friends and family. Learn more right here. ​ ​